Modified Best Ball

Five Reasons Why You Should Switch Your League to Modified Best Ball

What is a modified best ball league? Before I tell you why I love it, here’s how it works:

-Set up your starting lineup requirements like normal (i.e. 1 QB, 1RB, 2WR, 1TE, 2 FLEX).

-Set your total roster size like normal (i.e. 7 bench spots).

-Turn on Best Ball scoring whereby your starting lineup is optimized after the games are played based on your best player performances.

-Enable the “Taxi Squad” feature in your league with no restrictions on who is taxi eligible (I have done this in MFL, confirmed that you can't quite do it in Sleeper, not sure about others)

-Each week, instead of picking 7 starters and keeping 7 players on your bench, you now pick 7+x number of players for your main roster and 7-x for your taxi squad (i.e.10 on roster, 4 on taxi)

Now, let me tell you why I started doing this in all my (competitive) leagues a few years ago and think you should too.

#1 - Rewards skill. How many times have you built a great roster only to self-sabotage with bad start-sit decisions? There is skill variety in fantasy football (just look at DFS payout patterns) but in season-long or dynasty leagues, that skill is all too often not properly rewarded due to factors outside of your control. That brings us to..

#2 - Reduces randomness. Predicting any kind of human behavior is incredibly difficult (especially when looking at individual cases). The best rankers in the industry are wrong more often than they are right most weeks and it can be due to a variety of unforeseen circumstances: late scratch in London, injured but active (but doesn’t see the field), weird game script, injured early in the game, the concussion protocol in general. All of these and more can result in you taking a 0 and often an L and (most) are outside of your control. In the NFL, when a QB gets hurt the team isn’t forced to play without one, they can sub someone in. Short of real-time fantasy lineup changes and scoring, best ball is the best way to account for this but traditional best ball is a matter of simply drafting and watching it all play out. But in modified best ball…

#3 - Keeps owners engaged. In modified best ball you still have trades and the waiver wire just like standard leagues plus you still make roster decisions on a week-to-week basis deciding who to activate and who to move to the taxi squad. The difference is that rather than decide who will start at QB for your team, you decide if you will keep 1 or 2 QBs active in a given week. This also means that…

#4 - Allows for more strategies. Not only does it allow for strategy in terms of how many players of each position to keep active but it also makes more players viable. Boom/bust WR driving you crazy, start two or start one alongside a safe option. Want to get really nuts? Keep one player from SNF or MNF on your active roster and have one of another position on your taxi. 7pm on Sunday rolls along and you can pivot based on what happened during the day. The final reason I love modified best ball is that it pairs well with my other favorite fantasy football format in that…

#5 - It ‘fixes’ IDP. I know this is a provocative statement for my friends in the IDP community but think about your friends who don’t want to play the format or try it and leave. A chief complaint levied against the format is that there is too much week-to-week variation for IDP to be any fun. This issue is vastly reduced by moving to modified best ball. Plus, all of the other points above are enhanced by IDP (more skill rewarded, owners staying engaged vs straight best ball, more strategies to use). I love IDP and modified best ball fixes the long-considered unsolvable problem with the format.

In summary, if you don’t like modified best ball and think all of the imperfections with traditional leagues are just ‘a part of the game’ I have one question for you:

Questions, comments, arguments, help setting up or adjusting your league for modified best ball, reach out to me via Twitter @professorIDP.

*If you have a casual league with some people who have never played fantasy or are not big NFL fans, the traditional format is probably still the way to go for ease of play.